Shrubs and Bushes

Growing shrubs in your garden borders has a lot of advantages. Many shrubs are easy to grow and low maintenance, with year round interest, colour and scent.

Shrubs can add form and substance to a border. Herbaceous plants are like fireworks exploding into colour in the summer but then dying back to nothing, bare earth in the winter.

When designing a garden or reshaping a border shrubs are considered to be the backbone. A good rule of thumb is to have 1/3 evergreen to 2/3 deciduous, and it often seems to be the case that the best flowering shrubs are deciduous. If you require greater privacy, increase the number of evergreen shrubs to create denser screening. 
An important factor when choosing a shrub is its ultimate size. I get a lot of questions to the website for fast-growing shrubs, but fast-growing can also mean very large shrubs which need a lot of pruning to keep them from becoming monsters. Within any genus there are many varieties which may vary a great deal in size, so if you are looking to plant a new shrub, check out the variety.

There are so many to choose from, where to start?

 There are links below to pages with ideas for shrubs suitable for garden borders, for shade and sun, evergreen and deciduous with growing tips and advice, 

Sometimes you may need a shrub to provide screening and cover; there are plenty of easy to grow fast growing evergreen shrubs.